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What people are objecting to is that they have to edit the configuration manually in order to disable auto suspend.

Because, you know, editing configuration files is much too horrible for Linux users and every option under the sun has to be in the GUI for us to be able to deal with it.

Hell, why even have a GUI for configuring anything. If someone wants to change the color of their font, there's a .conf for that. New screen inactivity-screen saver trigger time? There's a .conf for that. Want to change the keyboard mousekeys? There's a .conf for that.

Windows and KDE lets you configure the action when you close your laptop lid, so it's obviously a bad thing.

Hell, why even have a GUI for configuring anything. If someone wants to change the color of their font, there's a .conf for that. New screen inactivity-screen saver trigger time? There's a .conf for that. Want to change the keyboard mousekeys? There's a .conf for that.

Pretty much.

Windows and KDE lets you configure the action when you close your laptop lid, so it's obviously a bad thing.

No. It's not a bad thing because KDE4 and Windows does it. It's a bad thing because it's main purpose is work around buggy hardware.

It's about what Red Hat can get working. If the Gnome-Shell is going to cause laptops to crash due to auto-suspend then you can bet Red Hat will fix this ASAP.

It's open source OS.

Instead of cobbling together features and forcing users to choose between multiple different solutions (all of which are broken in some fundamental way) people can actually go and FIX the problems.

Just like instead of forcing people to use bullshit hacks to get their wifi working by having Network-Manager adopt support for every hair brained configuration option, they just fixed the wifi drivers so the hacks were not necessary.

Just like instead of forcing people to edit custom asoundrc files and different weird combinations of pmix and amix plugins in a effort to get their sound to stop working like shit and sounding like shit... PA did away with all that. So instead of forcing people to work around buggy drivers you just fix the sound drivers.

So the goal here is to stop requiring users to configure their way around Linux's shitty power management and hardware support and just produce software that requires working hardware drivers. Then instead of putting time and effort into work around shitty drivers in user programs and configs developers can just fix the drivers so everything 'just works'.

This is the advantage that Linux can bring to the table over Windows. This is also why OS X is superior, in terms of usability, over Linux and Windows... because even though it is proprietary they control the hardware and can make sure everything 'just works'.

OS X doesn't have a configuration option to disable sleep either.

Why?

Because users don't have to deal with bullshit Windows drivers issues and do not have to deal with Linux's crappy power management support.

You can hack and fart around with your drivers and ruin your systems all you want. Just don't expect Gnome to support you in your endeavor.

Their goal is to make a system that is consistent and behaves in the most ideal manner that they see fit. If you think that limits you or controls you or that gnome's are nazis or whatever then all it shows is that you really don't understand how to make the system do what you want.

I can guarantee you that if you know python decently you could spend a evening working on a applet were you disable suspend-when-lid-closed with a single mouse click.

The Gnome configuration system makes this sort of thing EASY. Really. The whole system is designed for making it easier for developers and administrators, who know what their doing, to configure the details on how their user's desktops work.

The point is not everybody wants their laptop to automatically suspend when they close its lid. What if you want it to keep crunching on some task or playing music while you close the lid to save power. There are valid reasons why someone would want their laptop to suspend, hibernate, or turn off the screen, but there is no good reason to take away the ability of your users to make that choice for themselves.

I can guarantee you that if you know python decently you could spend a evening working on a applet were you disable suspend-when-lid-closed with a single mouse click.

Now that I think about it.

You can then share that code with everybody else and they can make it work in a easy manner also. In fact you can, very easily, write a configuration GUI program that can perform all sorts of tweaks and edits that Gnome's default configuration tools don't allow for it.

Think of it as a 'Ubuntu Power Tool'.

In fact I heavily encourage people to do so. There have been Gnome tweaker tools in the past. I've used a couple of them.

The point is not everybody wants their laptop to automatically suspend when they close its lid.

The point is that 99% of people either don't care or actually depend on consistant behavior.

I really dislike it when I have to use a system that I have to sit and stare at for a minute to make sure that it really actually did suspend before I stick it in a bag.

AND people who really do not want their laptop to suspend can still configure it. The whole 'enable the option' in dconf takes 10 seconds.

What if you want it to keep crunching on some task or playing music while you close the lid to save power.

You could just let the display shut off on it's own. That way you don't have to do anything at all. No configuration, no thinking, no nothing. Just walk away and in a few minutes it will disable the display.

here are valid reasons why someone would want their laptop to suspend, hibernate, or turn off the screen, but there is no good reason to take away the ability of your users to make that choice for themselves.

I never said there was no good reasons. I said the primary reason for the feature is to work around bullshit problems with the hardware.

Nobody had their choices taken away from them because Gnome decided to remote a button from a dialog. That's a huge overstatement.